Saturday August 27, 2016

What’s worse? The notion that many geneticists don’t proofread their data, or that it took this long for someone to realize this was going on?

آ…genes are often referred to in scientific literature by symbols آ— essentially shortened versions of full gene names. The gene "Septin 2" is typically shortened as SEPT2. "Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase" gets mercifully shortened to MARCH1. But when you type these shortened gene names into Excel, the program automatically assumes they refer to dates آ— Sept. 2 and March 1, respectively. If you type SEPT2 into a default Excel cell, it magically becomes "2-Sep." It's stored by the program as the date 9/2/2016.